


A Strange and Awful Thing

by Culumacilinte



Category: 12 Dancing Princesses (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animal Metaphors, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Group Sex, Magical Realism, Minor Character Death, Murder Sisters, POV Second Person, Polyamory, Sibling Incest, Sort Of, a la Flowers in the Attic, and deny them affection from any other source, because that is what happens when you lock 12 people in a room, literally just all of them are in a relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 02:35:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21292208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/pseuds/Culumacilinte
Summary: One loves those by whom one is shown love; your father keeps you locked away and wonders why you do not love him. Your father keeps you locked away and wonders why you have contrived a means of escape. One loves those by whom one is shown love; why should any of you then love another?In which the sisters take control of their story, and it does not end the way we are accustomed.
Relationships: Princesses/Princesses
Comments: 7
Kudos: 33
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2019





	A Strange and Awful Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sprl1199](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprl1199/gifts).

> Have an unexpected (and up to the wire) New Years Resolution fic! Happy early Yuletide! Going through all the prompts, I was suddenly really grabbed by the idea of doing, as my brain put it, 'Twelve Dancing Princesses but make it dark and magical realist and incesty', so I do very much hope you enjoy! I didn't see any mention of incest as a DNW in your prompt, so I hope it's something you'll dig.

You are but one, one of twelve, but never one apart.

One loves those by whom one is shown love; your father keeps you locked away and wonders why you do not love him. Your father keeps you locked away and wonders why you have contrived a means of escape. The locked door is never passed, neither broken nor cleverly coaxed open, and your father wonders, _ where? _ and demands, _ how _? But you and your sisters are cleverer than that. You are cleverer than your father, for you know what manner of story you’re in.

At night, it is for you and your sisters-- sharp Philomena, thoughtful Eleanora, laughing Lysandra. Night has always been your time. When you were small, you wept at the locked door you did not understand, and your sisters comforted you; in the daylight, such weeping would have been punished by your father as unbecoming of a princess, but at night, you are only yourself.

Your sisters are all of different mothers-- your father cares as little for them as he does for you-- but they are all beautiful. _ You _ are all beautiful, for you know yourself to be as fair as all the rest. Ceres with her cloud of dark hair and proud cheekbones, Melisandre’s skin white as milk and her braids falling long over her freckled breasts, Beatrix with her statue’s jawline, her strong arms with their hard muscles, Septima with her plump dark manicured hands and lush round belly that shakes when she laughs, Bhavani’s depthless eyes and striking profile and river of hair down to her knees. Any man would be lucky to have any of you, any kingdom the richer-- your father knows this.

He does not know that none other but you and your sisters will ever have each other. One loves those by whom one is shown love; why should any of you then love another?

You have journeyed to the land beneath your beds since before you can remember; what was a nursery and a glorious park for playing in when you were children is now a great villa with a dancing pavilion that shines under the too-large moon, and the lands all about have grown wilder, stranger and more glorious all at once. Where once were berry-bushes with real rubies and garnets that you crushed to impossible juice as children there are now woods of silver and gold and diamond and marshlands of iridescent fog, and the nannies and fairy playmates you remember from childhood visits have become dancing partners, dignitaries, courtiers and confidantes, uncanny and inhuman. They are beautiful and hideous and you feel very like them; you have never felt quite human, not entirely, not if human is like your father, and they suit you all fine. Every night since you can remember, you depart once the castle has gone to sleep, and every morning, you’re back precisely as the sun rises. Time in the Neath is a strange thing, and time spent dancing stranger still-- an infinity in a heartbeat which leaves you laughing and footsore. But every morning, you are back just as the sun crests the horizon, with your worn-through shoes in your hands or strung ‘round your necks. None of you knows by what magic time there is so ruled, only that it is.

That land is as fair as you twelve sisters and as dangerous as your father. Less dangerous, truly, for it makes no attempt to hide its dangers or sharp edges. Your father would have the world believe that his cruelties are but kindness and necessity; what else is a king to do, with a brace of wayward daughters and mistresses who refuse to bear him a son? You sneer at him from behind your locked door; you would respect him better if he knew his abuse for what it was. Any one of you would rather cut your feet on glittering glass-shard beaches or fight off unseen, unseeable things in the woods than smile at your father when he tells you he has found another prince to discover where you go at night.

Your father smiles when you do not, with his kingly beard and kingly belly, fine and resplendent and laughing, as if it is a marvellous joke between you all. He wags his finger, tutting and chuckling as at a precocious infant. ‘My clever girls; you can’t hide from every man in the land, you know. No-one’s _ that _ sly, not even you cunning baggages; one of them’ll ferret you out sooner or later!’ You are rabbits to him, and the men his hounds to flush you out of your warren with all the hullaballoo and bawl of a hunting pack.

They are princes, your father’s hounds, baronets in brocade and handsome emirs and well-bred, well-spoken dukes, a cavalcade of perfect, noble masculinity.

They are handsome and rich and fine, and all so stupid it makes you want to weep. Viivit has wept, before, safe in the Neath, and may again, snatching up whatever small woodland creature strays too near her sharp fingers and dashing it against a silver-leafed tree, bruising her knuckles on diamondwood and weeping ragged sobs at the unfairness of it all.

‘They’re all thick as mud!’ she cries, furious and bereft, as you all leave her to her despair. ‘And father the worst of the lot, if he thinks any of them can do a thing about us. I _ hate _ them, I _ hate _ having to smile and make nice and _ pretend _ \--!’

You let her rage and weep until she’s empty of all of it, and when you come to her and she reaches out to cup your cheeks, she leaves streaks and fingerprints, blood hers and not-hers. She anoints you, all twelve of you, with her fury. Viivit has her rage, and Ariadne her patient cleverness, and Carlotta has her joy, her confidence that all will be well in the end. And you? You have many things, but mostly you have love for your sisters, and theirs for you. Viivit kisses you after she consecrates your face with blood, and her tongue is hot in your mouth.

You fuck her there in the woods, when she’s panting and wrung out from her cries and her hands bloody to the wrist, nailbeds red and clotted. You all lay out your cloaks, your cotehardies and dresses on the night-damp loam and the fallen leaf-shards of gold and silver and diamond, and bear her down, your fingers--long, short, blunt, clever, callused, smooth-- on her and in her, your mouths on her cunt, drinking the heat of her body in the nighttime chill. One at a time, or sharing-- you have learned, over the years, the art of this particular dance. Some of your sisters hold her in their arms while others fuck and suck her until she cries out, and the flying droplets of her release catch in the eldritch moonlight. Others-- Ceres, Eleanora, Septima, Carlotta, Ariadne-- simply sit under the trees and watch, heads on each others’ shoulders or trading kisses as the rest take care of Viivit. She weeps again when all is over, but these are the sweet, clean tears of catharsis, overwhelmed but gratefully so.

Viivit smiles the fiercest of any of you during the dancing later, throwing her head back and howling her free, feral elation, and the crystal and earth courtiers in their otherworldly finery join her, laughing and howling like wild things. They are wild things, after all, truly. Beatrix sniffs a little tartly at the display, but you and Carlotta and Lysandra are all laughing in harmony with the howling, and you pull her into the orbit of your dance. You love your sisters best when they are _ free _ .

You hold onto that in the dreaded daylight hours. You are free to come and go in the daytime, nominally, but it is a wan and pale thing, an evanescent reflection of the true, wild freedom you’ve seen in your sisters in the Neath. New hounds-- new handsome, dull suitor-hunters-- arrive weekly, and your father expects you to welcome them with charm-- worse, with _ gratitude _. You are decorous, of course, but your smiles pinch at your cheeks, and you bite the inside of your lip until your mouth floods with iron.

This new one is not a prince, and he’s cleverer than any of the princes or baronets or emirs have been. An old soldier, his eyes are all crinkled at the corners with his years, and his sword is notched, and he’s unimpressed by your beauty. You feel you might almost have liked him, if you’d met him elsehow. Eleanora discovers the earth of your small garden wet with wine after he has gone to bed, so you know that his sleep is no true drugged sleep. Clever, but foolish in truth; what will await him in the Neath if he follows you is worse than the headsman’s sharp axe.

What magic the soldier’s used to conceal himself, you can’t guess, but you _ know _ he’s there, and the fury wells up in you like bubbling tar at his clumsiness and complacency. You would not, you decide, have liked him after all. He treads on your dress not once but thrice, he breaks twigs underfoot as he follows you, and all night long, your sisters find their wine glasses mysteriously emptied. Clumsy, _ lazy _, thinking himself so much cleverer than a collection of empty-headed princesses, as they all do. The feeling of betrayal is strange and acute; none other has ever discovered you, and somehow you’d thought that if anyone ever did, they might at least do a better job of it.

You return at sunrise, as ever you have, but today, the ache in your feet keeps you awake well into mid-morning, lying abed with your heart thudding and sweat pricking you beneath your nightclothes.

‘What shall we do?’ asks Ceres later, under the light of day. The soldier is off being fêted by your father, and you have no fear of being overheard.

‘We can’t let him tell’, says Septima, wringing her hands.

‘So we don’t let him leave’, says Beatrix with a shrug.

Eleanora’s eyes narrow contemplatively, and Lysandra snorts. Ariadne looks intrigued. ‘What, we kill him?’

‘We could just trap him there’, says Bhavani. ‘We don’t need to _ kill _him.’ She likes blood on her hands less well than do some of your other sisters.

‘Or’, you say, ‘we could let something else kill him.’ Eleven sets of eyes fall on you, thoughtful or worried or pleased or hungry, and you feel in you a squirm of pleasure, knowing that you have found the answer. Your sisters are clever and patient and resourceful, but this time, it is you who have saved them.

It is not so hard, after that, to determine your course.

There are a panoply of hungry, unnatural things living in the Neath; you and your sisters have hardly seen a fraction of them, you know that. You are not your father; you have no pack of bloodhounds to hunt down your quarry, no magical horn to call on the monsters of the woods to come and slaughter him or carry him off. But you know your way about where the soldier does not, and the land itself is monstrous as its creatures, places in the woods where the ground is not ground at all. Over the river, west of the castle in the woods, where the trees have leaves of opal, there is a carpet of seeming-fungus that rises up into sucking, swarming mouths to devour anyone unwary enough to tread on it. You do not know what creature all those mouths belong to, but you know it’s there, and the soldier does not.

The soldier has three nights to discover where you go for your father; you need only one night more to ensure that he doesn’t. Your hummingbird heart thrums anxiety, still, even knowing that, but Philomena grips your hand, and you turn to Beatrix’s set jaw and determined brow, and you are comforted.

And so, the second night, you proceed as ever. Your hair prickles on the back of your neck as you descend the long stairs. Septima chatters nervously, trying too hard to seem as if nothing were going on, until Melisandre kisses her gently to shut her up. You hear the noise the soldier makes under his enchantment of invisibility, surprise or disgust, and your lip curls. Is he reconsidering Father’s offer now, you wonder? As stupid as the rest of them. He treads on your skirts again, and your hands curl into fists under the long sleeves of your dagged houppelande.

You hear again the snap of metallic twigs as you process through the woods, laughing and chattering as you always do, looking forward to the feast and the dancing, and this night you say nothing. Perhaps the soldier will think you have not noticed the noise he makes at all. You greet your escorts at the river as ever, accepting their gallant kisses and tucking your skirts up out of the glittering waters, and you breathe in the scent of underground starlight as they row. The mist on your skin feels like a baptism. You pretend you do not notice how much deeper than usual your boat rides in the water, and you hold your mouth tight as you look ahead, seeking in the darkness for the glitter of opal.

Tonight, you do not accompany your fairy escorts directly; instead, you return their courtly kisses-- their cheeks are cool and inhumanly smooth beneath your line of brushing lips-- and tell them that you will join them shortly, and would they pray entreat the musicians to wait on you. They laugh like bells, or great cats, and they bow as they depart.

You laugh, and reach out for your nearest sister-- Bhavani, beside you-- your feet light and fleet as you laugh and skip over the bedewed grass. Your skirts drag, but the dew is fresh and not cold. The soldier, you know, must be following. He has no choice.

The tension in the air now is anticipation, giddy and giggling, the feeling of a _ moment _at hand. Every other hunting dog your father has sent after you has perished at the hands of the executioner for his own folly; never before has the retribution fallen to your hands, and you almost wish you had brought a knife with you instead of choosing to lure him into a trap. Comfort here has always been visceral, wet and red and in bodies; you feel vengeance should be the same. But you have no knife, and you have a plan, so you make your way on. For once, you are the hounds.

You say nothing until you’ve passed the eaves of the opal forest and suddenly a cry sounds from behind you, the air split with the babble of terror and nearly childish confusion. Half a heartbeat, and then comes the awful, ravenous gobble of the ground surging up, fungus-tendrils writhing and seizing around nothing. There’s a snag in your chest, sick and hungry and angry, but Philomena raises her voice above the clamour and it quiets. She is like a queen in the starlight, tall and straight and lit with power, keen as a lance, beautiful beyond enduring, and you clutch at Bhavani again, stricken anew with awe and adoration for your sister. You will dance with Philomena later, you decide, and give her anything she desires.

‘Go on, then’, she says, ringing and cold, ‘Let us see you.’

The mouths of the creature have ripped his invisibility from him as if at her command, and the soldier halts in his struggle and gapes up at you from amid his devourment. So plain is his bafflement that you cannot but laugh. It barks out in the woods like an animal cry, and the soldier turns to you, the youngest, whose skirts he has been treading on and whose wine he has been drinking, thinking you a fool whom he might buy from your father.

‘Did you seriously think we didn’t know you’d followed us?’ Ariadne sneers. ‘You would’ve done better to have drunk the wine and let our father chop your head off.’

The soldier’s eyes are wide, his mouth wide and red as he babbles and screams and pleads-- please pull him out, please, he’ll leave, he’ll go far away, he won’t tell the king, princesses, _ please _, he didn’t know.

‘They never do’, says Philomena, and it is glacial judgement in the warm summer woods. None of you moves to save him as the creature in the earth rips into his flesh, sucks and gnaws, swarms around him until he is again invisible, buried beneath a writhing mass of inexplicable limbs. His screams go on for some time, and your fingernails dig into Bhavani’s hand until you’re sure it must be bleeding, your ears full of the ragged symphony of it.

‘That would have been easier’, Ceres reflects dreamily after he’s finally gone silent, and there remains only the sound of _ consumption _, ‘if he hadn’t struggled.’

Lysandra laughs. Melisandre frowns. ‘I do wish it hadn’t come to that. Almost, anyway.’

‘But something’s changed, can’t you feel it?’ Carlotta sweeps over to Melisandre, seizing both her hands in hers. ‘We’ve never done that before, us, properly. We never had the chance. And now--!’

‘Yes’, agrees Eleanora, coming over to kiss Melisandre on the cheek and pet her hair. ‘That was-- yes. Come on, let’s go dance. They’re waiting for us.’

One loves those by whom one is shown love; you love your sisters, and you love this place, strange and awful as it is. It is by nature what you and your sisters have been made to be, and you love it with all the passion in your strange and awful heart. You dance, tonight, as you do on any night, and when you return, the sun has already risen.


End file.
